by Lois Duncan
“Poor Andy!” she’d gasped through her tears. “He was always so smart!”
Kait’s tough, I told myself. She can deal with almost anything—fractures, disfigurement, even with life in a wheelchair—but, please, oh, please, don’t let anything have happened to her brain!
The space in front of the emergency room was reserved for ambulances, so Don dropped me off at the door while he took the car across to the visitors’ parking lot. The nurse who had called us was standing in wait in the doorway, and I knew that it had to be bad when she took me in her arms.
“You’re sure it’s Kait?” I whispered. “There’s no chance it’s a mistake?”
“It’s Kait,” the woman said. “There was a picture ID in her wallet. She’s alive, but in critical condition. You need to prepare yourself for the fact that you may lose her.”
“A car wreck?” I couldn’t conceive of any other possibility.
“Your daughter’s been shot in the head,” the nurse said quietly.
The sand of the beach slid out from under my feet, as the tidal wave struck the shore and I was sucked under.
Kaitlyn Clare Arquette, age eighteen, in the spring of 1989, the year of her death
2
DON AND I SAT in a small private waiting area off the emergency room, side by side on a green vinyl couch, propped against each other like Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. If one of us had moved, the other would have fallen over.
After a while Don said, “We should call the boys.”
“Please, not yet,” I implored him. Once we started informing people I would no longer be able to tell myself this was a fragment of a fever dream. “There’s no sense dragging them down here at this hour of the night. It’s not as if there’s anything they can do here. Let’s wait until we have something definite to tell them.”
I could tell that Don didn’t agree, but he didn’t make an issue of it, and we continued to sit there, staring out into the hallway, waiting for somebody with authority to come in and talk to us.
At one point we saw Kait being wheeled past our doorway on the way to the X-ray room. Her face was slack and waxen, and her head was swathed in bandages. If we had not been told who she was, we would not have recognized her. We jumped up from the couch and trailed the gurney down the hall until the green-clad orderlies shoved it through a set of double doors into an area designated for doctors only. Then we went back to the waiting room and sat back down again.
We didn’t feel alone, because hospitals are busy places even on Sundays, and there was a steady flow of traffic in and out of the emergency room. Somebody brought us coffee that we couldn’t force down, and we let it grow cold on a table piled with magazines. A nurse came in with Kait’s purse and a plastic jar that contained the items removed from her person when she arrived at the hospital—her watch, the chain with the cross, the sand-dollar earrings.
The next person to visit us was a detective from the Homicide Department. He asked us when we had last seen Kait.
“She left our home at around six-fifteen to go to a girlfriend’s house for dinner,” I told him.
“I’ve spoken with the friend, Susan Smith,” the police officer told us. “Her address and a hand-drawn map were in Kait’s car. Susan said Kait was planning to spend the night with her and then suddenly remembered she had to study for a test tomorrow.”
“She’s taking two college classes in summer school,” I said. “She’s going to be attending full time in the fall.”
“Is her home address the one on her driver’s license?”
“No,” Don said. “That’s the family home. Kait lives at the Alvarado Square Apartments. She moved out on her own a month before she graduated.”
“Not quite on her own,” I said. “She lives with her boyfriend.”
“Dung Nguyen? We got his name from Susan. Is there anything we ought to know about that relationship?”
“It’s pretty much over,” I said. “They’ve been fighting a lot lately. Dung’s going to take this hard, though, so break it to him gently.”
The detective left, and a doctor came into the room to give us the results of the CAT scan.
“It doesn’t look good,” he said. “Kaitlyn’s head wounds are massive. One bullet struck her cheek, and another entered her temple. We’ve placed her on life support, and if she survives the next forty-eight hours, we might want to consider surgery to relieve the intracranial pressure. Aside from that, there isn’t much more we can do for her.”
“Is she in pain?” Don asked him.
“I’d like to believe not.”
“If she survives, will she ever be well?” I asked. ‘
“It’s possible, but not probable, that she’ll regain consciousness,” the doctor said. “Miracles do happen, and we never totally rule them out. The one thing I can tell you with certainty, though, is that if she does live she will never again be Kaitlyn as you knew her. Too much of her brain is gone for that to be possible.”
“What should we pray for?” I asked him.
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
The future rolled out before me like a thin gray carpet—days, months, years spent taking care of Kait’s body, an empty shell with the kernel of awareness removed from it. I experienced an unforgivable moment of self-pity. For the rest of my life I would be cast in the role of caretaker—bathing, diapering, spoon-feeding, exercising a vegetable. Unable to work, to travel, to visit my out-of-state children and grandchildren, I would live out the rest of my days with Kait’s body as my jailer.
“I can do that,” I said.
Don turned to stare at me.
“I can do that,” I repeated, and amazingly I meant it. There were plenty of people with heavier burdens to carry. My love for Kait wasn’t based upon her level of intelligence; with or without a brain she would always be my daughter.
“It’s time to tell the boys now,” Don said firmly. This time I gave him no argument.
We called our older son first. At twenty-eight Brett was still a swinging single with a party-boy life-style who sported a single earring and a three-inch ponytail. Although it was two A.M., we didn’t expect him to be asleep and were not surprised to find that his line was busy. After several attempts to reach him, during which we continued to get a busy signal, we decided he was probably entertaining a girl and had taken the receiver off the hook. Since he lived only blocks from the hospital, we drove over to get him.
When we pulled up in front of the house Brett shared with two other bachelors, we found him standing in the driveway.
“How badly is she hurt?” he demanded, getting into the car.
“It’s bad,” Don said. “Very bad. How did you know?”
“I had a call from a girl named Susan,” Brett said. “She said the police had been over at her place questioning her. They wouldn’t tell her what happened, but from the kinds of things they were asking her, she thought Kait must have been in an accident. She tried to call you, and when she didn’t get an answer, she decided to try the only other Arquette in the phone book. I thought you’d be headed over here, so I came out to wait for you. If you hadn’t turned up soon, I was going to start checking out hospitals.”
“She wasn’t in a wreck,” Don said. “She was shot.”
“Kait was shot!” Brett exclaimed incredulously. “You mean in a holdup?”
“We don’t know what happened,” Don said. “All we know is she’s critical. Now, let’s get Donnie, so we can get back to the hospital.”
Donnie, our twenty-one-year-old, had recently moved into his own apartment. We phoned him from Brett’s and drove over to pick him up. When he saw the headlights of our car turning in through the gate, he started to run toward us across the parking lot, his mane of wheat-colored hair flying out behind him.
I got out of the car and held out my arms, and he threw himself into them.
“I’m so mad!” he sobbed. “I’m so mad! It’s just not fair! Kait’s so nice! Why would anybody hurt Kait?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” I said. “It has to have been an accident. Some crazy idiot was playing around with a gun.”
I got into the backseat with him and tried to haul all six feet one of him into my lap, rocking him back and forth as if he were a baby and I was the Mighty Mother with magical powers who could kiss away hurts and make everything right for everybody. I felt his tears on my neck and longed to cry with him, but everything inside me had turned to stone.
Back at the hospital we were taken up to the intensive-care trauma ward to which Kait had now been transferred. She lay motionless on the bed, encased in a network of wires and tubes that connected her body to machines that blinked and beeped like monsters in a Star Trek movie. A screen over the bed displayed wavering lines that we assumed had important significance, but none of us had enough courage to ask what they indicated.
I went down to the lounge to put through calls to our two older daughters. I first called Kerry, who lived in Dallas with her husband, Ken, and their two little girls. Our son-in-law answered the phone, so I gave him the news first. By the time he handed the receiver over to Kerry, she had overheard enough to begin to brace for what was coming.
“Kait’s been shot,” I said. “I think you should come.”
“Shot dead?” Kerry asked, too stunned to show emotion.
“She’s alive,” I said, “but I think you’d better come soon, honey.”
Then I called Robin in Florida. I’d saved that call for last because I dreaded it so much. Despite a sixteen-year age difference the oldest and youngest of our children had always been exceptionally close. Robin lived by herself and had no one to give her emotional support as Kerry did. I hated to give her the news when she was alone, but I didn’t feel I could wait to call her at work. To my relief she managed to hold herself together and said she would make arrangements to come immediately.
When I got back to Kait’s room, I found that Dung had arrived and was standing next to her bed, seemingly in shock.
“It’s all my fault,” he muttered under his breath.
“No,” said Brett, who was extremely fond of Kait’s boyfriend. He put a comforting arm around the younger man’s shoulders. “So you guys had a fight, that doesn’t make you responsible for what happened. You couldn’t have prevented this, even if you’d been with her.”
“It’s all my fault,” Dung insisted, pulling away from him. He crossed to the window and pressed his face against the glass, staring out at the dark silhouettes of the mountains that were rapidly taking form against a lightening sky. I went over to stand beside him, and we watched the clouds in the east turn peach—then gold—then puffy and white against a backdrop of blue. The rain was over, and the day was going to be beautiful.
I remember that long, strange day as a series of vignettes, an assortment of images closer to dreams than reality. The shooting made the morning news shows, and friends began to turn up at the hospital. Susan Smith arrived and stood weeping in the hallway; I know we talked, but I can’t remember what we said to each other. A group of Kait’s coworkers at Pier One Imports trooped in with a get-well bouquet, and Kait’s best friend, Laura, and her boyfriend and mother came also. There wasn’t much conversation, but we were grateful for the emotional support of people who cared about us. One friend brought a sack of quarters so we could make calls from the pay phone. Another, assuming correctly that none of us had eaten, came with milk shakes. A neighbor we hardly knew volunteered to go over to our house to take care of the pets.
Kerry flew in from Dallas, and a friend picked her up at the airport and brought her to the hospital. Robin called to report that she had not been able to get the early flight she had tried for but would arrive that evening. She said to tell Kait to hang on until she got there.
One nurse told us that even though Kait was comatose it was possible she might be soothed by familiar voices.
“I know this sounds crazy,” she said, “but there are people who have come out of comas and been able to report everything that happened in their hospital room while they were seemingly unconscious. They’ve said they were out of their bodies, floating near the ceiling, looking down and taking in everything.”
Robin was a professional singer and songwriter. Knowing her voice was the one Kait would be most likely to react to, we put a cassette of her lullabies on a tape recorder and played it over and over throughout the day.
I sat by the bed and held Kait’s broad, strong hand—so unlike my own hand, so unlike the long, slender hands of her sisters—and told her, “Robin is coming. Robin’s on her way. You can’t leave yet, you have to wait around for Robin.” I watched the lines on the monitor, hoping to see some change in the sequence of patterns, but they stayed the same. Feeling foolish for doing so, I glanced self-consciously up at the ceiling, but if Kait’s spirit was there, it wasn’t in evidence.
The media descended upon us, and the hospital spokeswoman suggested that we hold a press conference so we wouldn’t have to talk to reporters individually. A friend taped the television interview and gave us a copy. Don and I are shown seated at a conference table, holding hands and staring, glassy eyed, into the camera lens, as we struggle to answer a barrage of questions.
“No, we don’t know who did this. It can only have been an accident.”
“What is she like? She’s pretty and funny and smart. She wants to be a doctor.”
“No, she doesn’t do drugs. No, she doesn’t drink. No, she wasn’t coming home from a party. No, she didn’t have any old boyfriends who were mad at her; she’s been dating only one person for a year and a half.”
The one question that really registered with me didn’t make it onto television and wasn’t quoted in the papers. Just as the conference was ending, one reporter demanded, “Didn’t you think it was dangerous to let a blond girl drive a red car in a city filled with Mexicans?”
“Of course not,” I told her. “That can’t have been the reason for this.”
When we returned to the trauma ward, Dung was waiting at the elevator.
“Hurry!” he told us frantically. “Something’s happening with Kait!”
We set off at a run down the hall, and when we reached Kait’s room we found that it was crowded with doctors and Kerry was standing out in the corridor.
“The lines on the monitor suddenly started jumping all over,” she told us. “I screamed for a nurse, and she sounded a Code Blue. They think the sudden acceleration in her heartbeat may have been caused by a massive hemorrhage in her brain.”
Eventually the doctors filed out, and we were allowed in the room again. The lines on the monitor had now flattened out, and Kait’s heartbeat appeared to have stabilized.
People from the organ donor program arrived to ask if we would consider donating Kait’s organs for transplant. As a contributing editor for Woman’s Day I had recently written an article about a woman who had given a kidney to her critically ill husband. Kait had responded to the story by getting a donor card. We agreed to donate her organs, grateful that she had spared us that painful decision.
We decided we needed to start spelling each other at the hospital, so Kerry and Dung kept a vigil at Kait’s bedside, while the rest of us went home for a couple of hours’ sleep. Don and our sons and I walked out into the parking lot to be confronted by a spectacular sunset. The heavens were blazing crimson and orange and gold, while a cloud-banked pathway of light fell straight to the earth like a stairway leading into the heart of the sun.
Kait will never see a sunset again, I thought, but Donnie surprised me by saying, “Look what a welcome they’re giving her!” He had never shown any interest in organized religion, and I had not even realized he believed in an afterlife.
Back at the house Don and I lay down to try to nap, but the phone kept ringing, and we were afraid to ignore it in case it was a call from the hospital. After an hour we gave up and decided to go back. Friends had been leaving food at the house all day, and we loaded up a tray of casseroles t
o take back with us.
This time, when we got off the elevator, it was Kerry who was waiting.
“I’ve been trying to decide whether to call you or just wait,” she said.
“Then it’s over?” I asked.
“Yes, Mother, I think it’s over. That hemorrhage flooded the brain stem. They think she’s brain dead.”
We stood in silence, waiting for a formal announcement.
Eventually a doctor emerged from Kait’s room and told us, “We have to make some final tests before it’s official, but there isn’t much doubt but that she’s gone.”
One by one we went in to say our good-byes. I kissed Kait’s cheek, and it was warm to my lips. When I placed my hand on her chest and felt it rise and fall to the steady rhythm of the respirator, it was hard to believe that she wasn’t alive.
“Sleep well, my baby,” I whispered. “Go with God.”
We all made phone calls. First, we called Brett and Donnie and told them to come back to the hospital. Kerry called Ken. I called my brother in San Francisco. Don called his three brothers in Michigan and Ohio. Dung wanted to use the phone, and I told him there was another at the end of the hall.
We met again with the organ-donor people to sign papers.
“You can’t take her yet,” I told them. “You have to wait until her oldest sister gets here. Her plane’s due in at midnight.”
“I don’t know if that will be possible,” one woman said doubtfully. “The heart and lung recipient is already on his way. His parents are driving him down from Santa Fe.”
“If you move her before Robin gets here, you can’t have her organs,” I said.
By now Kait’s brothers had arrived and were standing in the corridor, weeping and hugging Kerry.
Dung stood a little way apart with his face to the wall. I went over and turned him toward me and put my arms around him.
“Why don’t we call a friend to be with you?” I suggested, thinking he would want to be with someone who spoke his native language.